Want to Attract More Readers? Try Listening to Them

MOST journalists I’ve worked with have a reflexive aversion to interacting with readers. They subscribe to the view that editors and reporters have the most cultivated sense of which stories are most important, and which subjects most worthy of attention. Expecting them to consider the opinions of readers when making such journalistic decisions would be akin to asking an artist to produce a masterwork to accommodate the taste of a benefactor.

Keeping a good distance from readers worked fine over the last century of newspapering. But now that the monopolistic era of print is giving way to an accelerating stampede of digital, the relationship between newsrooms and their audiences is in a period of manifest change. The leadership at The New York Times, in a shift from the past practice, is aiming to produce a product that consumers have a greater say in creating.

More than most news organizations, The Times has hitched its future to building a loyal audience that will come back repeatedly and pay for the privilege of doing so. These readers contribute more than half of The Times’s total revenue, almost unheard-of for a mass audience publisher. The goal is to double digital revenue within the next five years, and dedicated readers will be a key part of that. This means that instead of just chasing clicks — though the paper has begun to indulge in that, too — The Times hopes to make its content sufficiently unique and addictive that it turns frequent visitors into subscribers.

The Times is keenly aware that readers are its most prized asset. But as a recent strategy report found, the company must be far more aggressive in reaching a broader audience and adapting to new tastes. Susan Chira, a deputy executive editor who helped lead an internal committee examining this issue, told me there are few more important priorities. “If we don’t do this, we can’t do anything else,” she said. “We have to have a broader audience to fund what we do.”

If the plan is to engage a broader audience, then what is The Times doing to make that happen? I arrived only this past week, but from the conversations I’ve had with the leadership and with the rank and file, it’s clear that there’s a long stretch of highway between the goal and present-day reality.

Take reader comments on stories. This is arguably the most elemental way The Times can let its audience engage. Yet only about 10 percent of articles on any given day are open for comment. While an important effort is underway to improve that, its arrival has been hindered by various obstacles, including other newsroom priorities.

And despite the need to pull the audience closer, only a relatively small number of newsroom staffers devote a portion of their day to reader concerns. Besides the comments team, there is the corrections desk, which often deals with readers. There is the letters editor, whose team engages with readers who trend older. There is the audience team, which among other key functions monitors user behavior on social platforms. And there is the office of the public editor, me as of last week, and my assistant, Evan Gershkovich. That’s about it.

Clearly, there is more to understanding readers than to literally have editors interact with them each day. Nonetheless, the small number of consumer-facing staffers is indicative of the bigger problem: a newsroom too distant from the people it serves.

What The Times and most other newsrooms mostly do now is not so much listen to readers as watch and analyze them, like fish in a bowl. They view them in bulk, through statistics measuring how many millions of “unique” users clicked on content last month, or watched a video, or came to the site multiple times, or arrived through Facebook.

What would prove more fruitful is for newsrooms to treat their audience like people with crucial information to convey — preferences, habits and shifting ways of consuming information. What do they like about what we do and how we do it? What do they want done differently? What do they turn to other sites for?

Had we been listening more carefully and sooner, we would have known that our readers were using their phones for news while we were focused on monitors. And spending hours on social platforms before we had staffed “audience teams” to attract them. Or beginning to block ads while we were deploying “pop-ups” that took over user screens.

Ben French, vice president for products at The Times, was Chira’s co-chairman of the committee formed last year with the aim of helping the newsroom make the transition to a more audience-focused mind-set. Already, editors in feature sections, including Food and TV, are creating new products based in part on what they’ve learned about their readers’ interests and behavior.

“If we’re going to be a subscriber-based business there has to be a cultural change,” French told me.

One challenge will be to make changes to The Times that don’t turn away current subscribers but that still attract prospective ones, especially millennials.

Younger readers, for example, want to feel a sense of being close to the action. They want a dynamic relationship that feels more like a conversation between journalist and reader, and they welcome a little levity mixed into their news.

The paper has already made some meaningful steps in this direction. But adapting to changing reader tastes may not be easy for The Times, a name synonymous with trust and quality, but also with stuffiness and a rather muzzled sense of humor. After all, it still clings to the use of courtesy titles before people’s last names, an anachronism that may not track with the tastes of modern readers.

In May, Dean Baquet, the executive editor, told the staff that the way The Times tells stories would be changing. “Fewer stories will be done just ‘for the record,’ ” he said. “In fact, fewer traditional news stories will be done over all. Stories will relax in tone.”

The audience committee is now taking what it has learned on the road, making the rounds through various departments of the newsroom. Success may require a gospel-style conversion to convince 1,300 journalists that what wasn’t a priority in the print age is crucial now.

I hope they are successful, as I am one of the converts. I no longer believe that listening to readers leads to dumbed-down journalism, if handled well. Think of pioneering comedians like Jon Stewart, arguably his own brand of journalist. He created a whole new genre of delivering the news. His incisive wit and brilliance enabled him to convey, in one entertaining spoof, what reams of reporters missed through more dutiful stories. The audience had a need, and Stewart found a way to fill it.

I don’t worry that The Times will go too far in incorporating reader ideas, nor do I think it will be careless in doing so. I worry that it won’t go far enough.